Thread by @mittsh, As we’re announcing today the acquisition of Paw by @Rapid

As we’re announcing today the acquisition of Paw by @Rapid_API, I wanted to share some bits of Paw’s journey: http://blog.paw.cloud/paw-joins-forces-with-rapidapi/

But also some anecdotes…
(1/n)

Shortly after releasing Paw, I got a *job* offer from an exciting and huge Silicon Valley company with a sweet paycheck, relocation, etc. Couldn’t get a visa due to the H-1B quota. Turned down the company’s offer to move to London instead. Kept working on Paw. No regrets!

At first, Paw took some time to gain traction. And this is the HN post that made it really take off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716444
Still thankful to the guy who posted it. The post made it to the 1st position. App downloads skyrocketed that day.

That's how the first version of Paw looked like. It was on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Yes, still at the time of big cat names.

Paw was initially released on the Mac App Store. It was nice to gain some extra visibility, be part of the Apple ecosystem, despite the 30% cut on sales. But the lack of trial versions and later the impossibility to sell team subscriptions made us move away.

And I'd like to take my hat off to the awesome people who worked on Paw with me over the years!

The first one in time, Ben @nightbirdsevo, also author of @meta4mac is a UI and macOS wizard. He made many native components for Paw. Thank you, Ben!!

Competing for the title of macOS fanboy, @nfgrilo! Nuno is absolutely incredible: if there was a bug in macOS, he'd find a fix so Paw wouldn't be buggy even when the OS was. And all that between two surfing sessions: I was in rainy Paris and Nuno by the beach in Portugal

It's no wonder that he also developed https://goepic.surf/

So many good memories — thank you for having contributed to Paw, Nuno!

Epic - find best surfing waves

Surf forecast for avid surfers

https://goepic.surf/

And the brain behind Paw Cloud and its magical git versionning, @hishnash! We spent countless hours on the whiteboard designing the cloud syncing system with Python, Cython, libgit2, Postgres, and an in-house C library.

More on how Paw Cloud works by @hishnash

https://medium.com/hackernoon/aws-as-a-stateless-platform-for-cloud-syncing-services-7afe1908463c

And, we've worked together in Paris, remotely, from Portugal and even from Saint Petersburg!

Thank you for having played a great role in Paw, Matt!!

And the team had a crazy idea: make an open source project that would bridge the gap between all API formats (Paw, OpenAPI, RAML, API Blueprint, even Postman or Insomnia).

@JonMontane was the developer behind this project, that was a huge project and served Paw well! Thank you, Jon!!

@natpanferova joined Paw at the very beginning of her career as a developer and was already doing wonders in React

That of course, besides helping with writing great documentation articles! Thank you, Natalia!!!

And more recently, @pavlikgavrik became a true UI/UX wizard for Paw: building an entire component library, soon-to-be a fully fledged Design System. He's also the one who designed our new fox.

Ask him to make a "quick animation" to showcase our UI, he comes back 3 days later with a professional After Effects video He's our Jony Ive, there's no doubt about that. Thanks for being onboard, Pavel

@pavlikgavrik

For the Web version of Paw, we've developed our own component library in React. That was a huge project, but it's going to help us keep building great looking quality interfaces for the years to come.

The man behind this is @schwarzman! He architected the library and developed most components, from the simple Typography to complex Dynamic Fields! Thanks for being here, Sasha!!

Did we mention that Paw is coming to Windows and Linux? Look no further, Philip is the guy behind the cross-platform apps (and many many other things to be fair). You'll see him with 3 different computers in the background during our video standups. Thank you, Philip!!

And and…the one that you are the most likely to know, Piotr! Not only he answers your emails, renews customer's contracts, but he's YOUR best advocate in the team. Bugging us until we fix that bug! Thank you, Piotr for being a huge part of the Paw team

There's another story that I've heard of only recently. In 2014, someone bought a Paw license and has kept using it to test APIs since then. It's @iddogino the founder of @Rapid_API.

And it's finally time for me to thank you, Iddo, not only for being such a believer in Paw since its early days but also for welcoming us to the RapidAPI family! We're only doubling down on Paw and making it better than ever before

Before I end this thead, there's someone else who's been a huge believer in Paw and most likely the very first user of Paw, my good friend @anakin. He still hasn't purchased a license until this day

…but the amount of feedback that he sent is invaluable. Huge thanks, JC

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